A Short History of the English Language

I was so busy getting ready for my book launch a couple of days ago that I forgot I had a blog post to write! I have been writing this blog for over two years, a post sometime every weekend, and I haven’t missed a post yet. So, if you added yourself to the mailing list at the book launch, you will be reading some of what you heard, and I apologize. However, if you look back at previous posts, I know you will find some interesting things!

Back to the launch: Usually when I speak before a group, I use a grammar quiz, so it is interactive. This is probably the first time I have given a true 30-40 minute speech, so it did take some time to prepare. I had 13 pages of notes! Of course, they were printed in 16-point type, so I wouldn’t need my reading glasses.

I talked about the state of the English language and then gave some history of how it came to the point it is at now. Then I presented some things that have been in previous blog posts: funny phobias, readers’ pet peeves, and interesting things about the language.

Thank you to everyone who came to the launch, by the way! It was standing room only, with many seats taken by enthusiastic 7th graders! Yes, there were adults there, and even a dog! We had some laughs, we sold some books, we ate some cake . . . it was a good evening.

So where did this crazy language of ours come from, anyway?

English is a hodgepodge of, among other things, Latin, Greek, French, German, and Dutch.

Chaucer was the first person to choose to write in English, but Shakespeare was the most famous. He added many words to the language. Words first seen in Shakespeare’s plays include accommodation, assassination, dexterously, dislocate, indistinguishable, obscene, premeditated, reliance, and submerged.

Many of our common idioms were either coined by Shakespeare himself or were first seen in his plays: it’s Greek to me, salad days, vanished into thin air, refuse to budge an inch, green-eyed jealousy, tongue-tied, fast and loose, tower of strength, in a pickle, knit your brows, slept not a wink, laughed yourself into stitches, had too much of a good thing, have seen better days, lived in a fool’s paradise, the long and short of if, foul play, teeth set on edge, in one fell swoop, without rhyme or reason, give the devil his due, dead as a door nail, eyesore, laughing-stock, and devil incarnate.

Did you know that Shakespeare had one of the largest vocabularies of any English writer — 30,000 words? Estimates of an educated person’s vocabulary today is a mere 15,000 words.

The King James Bible, published in the year Shakespeare began working on his last play, The Tempest, contains only 8,000 different words.

The first English dictionary was published in 1604 with 120 pages, the same page count as my first book, The Best Little Grammar Book Ever! Perhaps it should have been called The Best Little English Dictionary Ever! — but it was called A Table Alphabeticall, written by Robert Cawdray. It contained “hard words for ladies or other unskillful persons.”

In 1806 Webster published his first dictionary, having written some grammar and spelling books prior to writing the dictionary.

And here is how our language became so colorful:

Let’s talk about the Irish for a minute: The word broguesounds like the Irish word for shoe: the Irishman was said to speak with a shoe on his tongue! Some details of American grammar, syntax, and pronunciation are from the Irish, such as I seen instead of I saw and yousefor the plural you.

Jive talk from the musicians and entertainers in Harlem added to this list: chick, groovy, have a ball, this joint is jumping, square, and yeah, man.

The first pioneers to arrive in this country needed to make up some new words. Some of these first Americanisms are lengthy, calculate, seaboard, bookstore, and presidential, with pretzel, canyon, and wigwam from the native Americans.

New Orleans gave us words like brioche, jambalaya, and praline. (Yum!)

Yiddish words come from the Jewish-Americans, many of whom were in the media, many of them comedians: chutzpah, schlep, shtick, mensch, nebbish, schlemiel, schmooze, meshugunner, and yenta.

I think I will stop here. There are obviously newer additions to the language: surfer talk, Valley Girl words, and now tech words — and emojis, which aren’t words at all!

I would like to thank everyone who supported me by coming to the book launch; Copperfield’s Books for once again hosting me in fine style; and The Story of English by McCrum, MacNeil, and Cran for providing me with much of this information!

(For some reason or other your website does not accept angle brackets to indicate quotes, so I will use # instead – if that works…)

Dear Arlene,

I was a little flabbergasted (1772 Ann. Reg. ii. 191 ‘On New Words’, Now we are flabbergasted and bored from morning to night.) by the way you represented the origins of the following words.
brogue: #…the Irishman was said to speak with a shoe on his tongue!# I take it you said this tongue in cheek, since ‘brogue’ means ‘the speech of those who wear brogues’, or ‘who call their shoes brogues’.

#The first pioneers to arrive in this country needed to make up some new words. Some of these first Americanisms are … #
calculate: ‘To estimate or determine by arithmetical or mathematical reckoning; to compute, reckon. ‘ (1570 Dee Math. Pref. 42 Hable to Calculate the Planetes places for all tymes.)

sea-board: ‘The line where land and sea meet, the coastline; the sea-shore or the land near the sea, esp. considered with reference to its extent or configuration.’ In this particular meaning, yes, perhaps: (1788 F. Asbury Jrnl. 10 July (1821) II. 36 The Gnats are almost as troublesome here, as the moschetoes in the low-lands of the sea-board.). But then you should have made that more precise (and clearer…).

presidential: ‘Of or pertaining to a president or his office.’ (1603 Florio Montaigne iii. xii. 629 A President of the law‥vanted himselfe, to have hudled vp together two hundred and od strange places in a presidentiall law-case of his.)

# …with pretzel, canyon, and wigwam from the native Americans.#
[G. pretzel, bretzel, in OHG. brizzilla = It. bracciello (Florio) a cracknel; usually taken as ad. med.L. bracellus a bracelet; also a kind of cake or biscuit (Du Cange).]
‘A crisp biscuit baked in the form of a knot and flavoured with salt; used esp. by Germans (! native Americans???) as a relish with beer.’

canyon: [Sp. cañon tube, pipe, conduit, barrel, cannon, etc. (augm. of caña:—L. canna reed, pipe, quill, cane; thus the same word as It. cannone, Pg. canhão, Pr. and F. canon, Eng. cannon, and canion), but spec. applied by the Spaniards (! native Americans???) of New Mexico in the sense in which it has been adopted from them by their English-speaking neighbours. In order to retain the pronunciation and prevent confusion with canon, which would result from the frequent want of the Spanish letter ñ, ñ (enye), in English typography, the word is frequently spelt canyon, q.v.]
‘A deep gorge or ravine at the bottom of which a river or stream flows between high and often vertical sides; a physical feature characteristic of the Rocky Mountains, Sierra Nevada, and the western plateaus of North America.’

#New Orleans gave us words like brioche, jambalaya, and praline. (Yum!)# I take it that New Orleans itself did not give you these words, but provided for them from the French. Even ‘jambalaya’ is from the south of France, the Provence (Provençal ‘jambalaia’).

#Gold rush words…#
‘To mark (land) with stakes. N. Amer., to claim (land) by marking it with stakes.’
(c 1330 R. Brunne Chron. ‘Wace’ (Rolls) 1852 Þey‥mesured lond, & dide hit stake þat ilkon dide his owen knowe. 1715 Maryland Laws vi. (1723) 20 The Surveyor‥shall have‥Fees and Rewards of laying out and staking the Towns and Lots.
So not only during the Gold Rush, and not only in America (You may not have read Robert Brunne’s ‘Wace’; I did).

#Yiddish words come from the Jewish-Americans, many of whom were in the media, many of them comedians: chutzpah, schlep, shtick, mensch, nebbish, schlemiel, schmooze, meshugunner, and yenta.#
And a lot of those Jewish-Americans never made it to the media (though many of them may have been comedians, indeed…).

Many times we talk about grammar in terms of writing. This blog post is about speaking. We don’t need to worry about punctuation when we speak, but we do have to worry about grammar—and pronunciation (which we don’t have to worry about when we write).

A while ago, one of my readers asked me to write a post about my life as a self-publisher. However, before I became a self-publisher (or “indie” publisher, as we like to call it), I was a writer for a very long time. I think most people who write have been writing for most of their lives.